Ok this is probably the most shocking, useful and controversial talk in the Google I/O this year. We had two of the creators of SVN (very cool guys) telling us (in a very FULL room) that there are no genius and that honestly if we have so much diversity and anonymity in Internet: everyone is a (fake) genius and we are more insecure about criticism than ever. This generates a very bad situation because not only we (all) think our new code will change the world but we are so afraid of failure that we never show our code to anyone, never comment anything about our new projects and end up wasting tons of time.

So they ask, why do we hide our code? And why do we create these mythological heroes like Guido or Torvals, like Woz or Gates?

Their points are very valid; yes this guys where successful, but they are not one-man-armies! They where the leaders of a great team and knew how to use the input from a lot of people to create awesome stuff.

So after a couple of tips they say that if you are a little fish in a big pound then you will learn faster. If you are not afraid of criticism you will be able to do code review. Having code review will lower the amount of people that centralize knowledge and skill in your project and then you will have a fairly equal team.

So their proposition is that if you do all that, you will learn more, have a better live and actually; people will THINK your a genius.

Honestly I felt a lot of people in the room didn’t listen to what they said. They where just cheering their heroes (which is ironic), but the one clear thing I learned here which it’s very important is:
If you fail a lot of times (in different stuff), the fails become cheaper and faster and the success becomes bigger and better; until hopefully you get great success.